The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood

HUANG Junliang

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HUANG Junliang. The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2019, 2(1): 108-118.

Citation:

HUANG Junliang. The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2019, 2(1): 108-118.

HUANG Junliang. The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2019, 2(1): 108-118.

Citation:

HUANG Junliang. The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2019, 2(1): 108-118.

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The Trauma of Another: The Female Body and National Victimhood

HUANG Junliang

California State University, Northridge

Received Date: 2018-10-11

Abstract

Abstract

This paper discusses the nationalization of individual victimhood in literary works on the Asia-Pacific War. Taking a comparative approach, it focuses on the traumatized female body, its revelation as well as its suppression, in wartime and postwar literary narratives in Japan and China. Looking into the politics of the female victim’s traumatized body in some influential literary works set in wartime Japan and China, I argue that in both countries, the discourses of the war are imprinted with a gendered mark in the self-claimed victimhood of the nation that represents and reveals itself through the victimhood of its women. Such practices always sacrifice a subtle and affective reading of those wounds for some greater purposes or meanings for the sake of the patriarchal nation.
- trauma,
- the female body,
- the Asia-Pacific War,
- nation state,
- gender oppression

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